Individual aptitude in Mandarin lexical tone perception predicts effectiveness of high-variability training

Abstract

Although the high-variability training method can enhance learning of non-native speech categories, this can depend on individuals’ aptitude. The current study asked how general the effects of perceptual aptitude are by testing whether they occur with training materials spoken by native speakers and whether they depend on the nature of the to-be-learned material. Forty-five native Dutch listeners took part in a 5-day training procedure in which they identified bisyllabic Mandarin pseudowords (e.g., asa) pronounced with different lexical tone combinations. The training materials were presented to different groups of listeners at three levels of variability: low (many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker), medium (fewer repetitions of a more variable set of words recorded by three speakers), and high (similar to medium but with five speakers). Overall, variability did not influence learning performance, but this was due to an interaction with individuals’ perceptual aptitude: increasing variability hindered improvements in performance for low-aptitude perceivers while it helped improvements in performance for high-aptitude perceivers. These results show that the previously observed interaction between individuals’ aptitude and effects of degree of variability extends to natural tokens of Mandarin speech. This interaction was not found, however, in a closely matched study in which native Dutch listeners were trained on the Japanese geminate/singleton consonant contrast. This may indicate that the effectiveness of high-variability training depends not only on individuals’ aptitude in speech perception but also on the nature of the categories being acquired.

Talker and Acoustic Variability in Learning to Produce Nonnative Sounds: Evidence from Articulatory Training

“…Participants in the single‐talker group did not gain in the compactness of the trained vowels nor did they improve their production accuracy (although their productions were 15% closer to the target after training, which was not significant) . These results are in line with previous perception studies showing that variability is required for the generalization of learning, be it new speakers, new contexts, or new sounds (Lively et al., ; Sadakata & McQueen, , ; Wang et al., ). More importantly, our results demonstrated that the generalization of learning in the multiple‐talker group arises from between‐talker variability in the training materials and not from the acoustic or contextual variability, because contextual variability was matched between the two training conditions.…”

“…For instance, in the study by Chang and Bowles, English speakers with no experience learning Mandarin acquired Mandarin tones better in monosyllabic words (characterized by less variation in individual tone contours) than in disyllabic words (characterized by more variation in tone contours). Interestingly, recent studies have shown that novice learners can still benefit from variability if they have strong general perceptual abilities, such as the ability to detect a pitch contour (Antoniou & Wong, ; Perrachione, Lee, Ha, & Wong, ; Sadakata & McQueen, ). The results of these studies suggest that variability interferes with initial learning of L2 contrasts for novice learners with poor perceptual abilities.…”

How category learning occurs in adults and children

“…However, low-aptitude perceivers did worse on high-variability as compared to low-variability training. Sadakata & McQueen (2014) showed a similar pattern of results for Dutch learners of Mandarin. An examination of additional language contrasts is needed.…”

Do Explicit Instruction and High Variability Phonetic Training Improve Nonnative Speakers’ Mandarin Tone Productions?

“…For the monolingual L1 English group, however, this was an unexpected result given the robust improvement observed in Wang et al. (), and the similar facilitatory effects reported in the lexical tone perceptual learning literature (e.g., Barcroft & Sommers, , ; Sadakata & McQueen, ; Shih & Lu, ). The difference between the present study and Wang et al.…”